{"id":10025,"date":"2019-03-08T13:46:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T13:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/?p=10025"},"modified":"2019-03-18T16:18:20","modified_gmt":"2019-03-18T16:18:20","slug":"shane-weller-language-european-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2019\/03\/08\/shane-weller-language-european-modernism\/","title":{"rendered":"Shane Weller on Language and Negativity in European Modernism"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil which one\u00a0has to tear apart in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying\u00a0behind it.’ So wrote Samuel Beckett in July 1937, describing his\u00a0own emerging conception\u00a0of literature, grounded in the idea that, far from being\u00a0an effective means of expression or a way of mapping the world, language\u00a0obstructs access both to the outer and to the inner realms. Professor of Comparative Literature Shane Weller’s most recent\u00a0book, Language and Negativity in European Modernism<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>explores the relation between literary form and history of a distinct strain of European literary modernism that emerged out of a radical re-engagement with late nineteenth-century language scepticism.<\/p>\n

Focusing first on the literary and philosophical strands of this language-sceptical tradition, the book proceeds to trace the various forms of linguistic negativism deployed by European writers in the interwar and post-war years, including Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald.<\/p>\n

Through close analyses of these and other writers’ attempts to capture an ‘unspeakable’ experience, Language and Negativity in European Modernism<\/em> explores the remarkable literary attempt to deploy the negative potentialities of language in order to articulate an experience of what, shortly after the Second World War, Beckett described as a vision of ‘humanity in ruins’.<\/p>\n

As Shane Weller describes it in his book: ‘With its roots\u00a0in late nineteenth-century language scepticism, intensified through the\u00a0experience of historical catastrophe, the modern European literature of the\u00a0unword becomes nothing less than an attempt to find the terms in\u00a0which to begin to rethink our condition in dark times.’<\/p>\n

Shane Weller is Professor of Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature<\/a>. His publications include A Taste for the\u00a0Negative: Beckett and Nihilism<\/em> (2005), Beckett, Literature, and\u00a0the Ethics of Alterity<\/em> (2006), Literature, Philosophy, Nihilism: The\u00a0Uncanniest of Guests<\/em> (2008), and Modernism and Nihilism<\/em> (2011). He\u00a0is also the co-author (with Dirk Van Hulle) of two volumes in the\u00a0Beckett Digital Manuscript Project series: The Making of Samuel\u00a0Beckett\u2019s \u2018L\u2019Innommable\u2019\/\u2018The Unnamable\u2019<\/em> (2014) and The Making of\u00a0Samuel Beckett\u2019s \u2018Fin de partie\u2019\/\u2018Endgame\u2019<\/em> (2018).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil which one\u00a0has to tear apart in order to get to those things … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34790,"featured_media":10026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[135858,18583,124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10025"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10133,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10025\/revisions\/10133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}